Quite some time ago I got talking in a pub to a white South African who’d been conscripted into the apartheid army and had fought at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. He said he didn’t get to do much fighting because he ran ten miles in the opposite direction when the Cuban army appeared.

An estimated 2000 or so Cubans gave their lives fighting apartheid and their story is largely untold. Even in Cuba you don’t see memorials to these heroes. Yet it is that spirit of self-sacrificing internationalism which inspires such a deep loyalty and affection for the idealism of the Cuban revolution. The recent aid delivery to the island by Jeremy Corbyn and Kneecap among others was an important political statement as well as a humanitarian necessity.

There is no need to waste time dismissing the nonsense about Cuba being a threat to the United States. There is only one gangster terrorist state in the Americas, and it has been doing everything possible to return the country to the status of a colonial brothel for more than sixty years.

Nor is there any need to defend the anti-democratic practices of the Cuban leadership in that period. The kindest thing that you can say about its political system is that it developed a form of Stalinism that didn’t have gulags and was, within limits, willing to allow some freedom of expression. I was lucky enough to have met Celia Hart, a daughter of leaders of the revolution, a couple of times and she represented everything admirable about the country.  Unlike American supported regimes in the region, the Cubans did not run death squads, torture opponents and wage war against farmers and trade unionists. These facts contributed enormously to Cuba’s moral authority.

A few days ago, Starmer’s government bragged that it was cutting £6bn of foreign aid to some of the poorest people in the world and would be donating the money to arms companies. However, even when Cuba was being strangled by the American embargo it was still sending teams of doctors and medical staff all over the world and seeking nothing in return.  

The imperialist barbarians have reduced the Cuban people to a state of dire poverty, and it seems virtually inevitable that the Americans will either invade or do a Maduro style operation with people in the Communist Party leadership. The international balance of forces which made it possible for the revolution to succeed and endure is now completely unfavourable to a country which the United States wants to recolonise.

Despite all this, the unique idealism, self-sacrifice and internationalism of the legacy of the Cuban revolution will continue to represent the hope of victory against an overwhelming power.